“I’ll just clear the table,” she said, rising briskly.
Jack sat rather slack in his chair, his long, malevolent body half sunk, and his chin dropped.
“What boat do you think you’ll catch?” he asked.
“The Manganui. Why?”
But Jack did not speak. He sat there with his head sunk on his chin, his body half-turgid, as if he were really not quite sober.
“You won’t be honouring Australia long with your presence,” he said ironically.
“Nor dishonouring it,” said Richard. He was like a creature that is going to escape. Some of the fear he had felt for Kangaroo he now felt for Jack. Jack was really very malevolent. There was hell in his reddened face, and in his black, inchoate eyes, and in his long, pent-up body. But he kept an air of quiescence, of resignation, as if he were still really benevolent.
“Oh, I don’t say that,” he remarked in answer to Richard’s last, but in a tone which said so plainly what he felt: an insulting tone.
Said Richard to himself: “I wouldn’t like to fall into your clutches, my friend, altogether: or to give your benevolence a chance to condemn me.”
Aloud, he said to Jack: